Binocular Vision Difficulties

Experience Ability With Visual Sense Eye Care

Visual Sense Eye Care is a leading provider of comprehensive vision therapy. Because our practice takes an integrative approach to visual health, we are able to ensure our patients receive the care and treatment that truly suits their needs.

What Is Vision Therapy?

Vision therapy is the use of specific exercises, tools, and equipment to improve the way that the brain’s visual connections and visual system works as a whole. This includes developing vision and visual functional skills, treating visual dysfunctions, enhancing visual performance to meet defined needs, and restoring vision and function in patients with brain injury.

Each person’s vision therapy program is tailored to meet their unique needs. These programs include tools such as prisms and lenses, special equipment, activities in space, computer games, and challenging, yet fun exercises that engage functions such as hand-eye coordination.

Who Could Benefit From Vision Therapy

Lots of people have benefitted from the power of vision therapy including athletes, those who have suffered a brain injury, and individuals with special needs such as developmental delays.

Vision therapy is a dynamic practice that can be applied to many different issues. Some common difficulties that vision therapy can treat include:

• Amblyopia (lazy eye)
• Strabismus (turned eye)
• Double vision
• Post-concussion symptoms
• Learning-related visual disabilities
• Sports vision training

What’s important to remember is that vision therapy works by improving the entirety of the visual system with time and dedication. This has less to do with your eyes than you might think! Your eyes, brain, neurological pathways, and different sensory inputs that connect them play a huge roll in visual ability. Vision therapy works by helping the eyes, brain, and the rest of your visual system learn how to function and process information more efficiently.

Binocular Vision Issues

Binocular vision is how both of our eyes coordinate with one another to align and work together to fixate on what you are wanting to look at. In order to read comfortably, your eyes must first be able to both point or fixate on the same spot on the page, zoom in or focus to make the text clear, process the visual information, be aware of the text next to it to then plan an eye movement to the next section of text. To achieve this comfortably, your eyes must coordinate together.. 

If an individual is experiencing binocular vision difficulties, this means that they may be having trouble with functions such as…

• Eye Teaming: the ability to use both eyes together. For example, convergence is the ability of both eyes to move inwards toward each other, usually in an effort to view a near object.
• Tracking: eye movements such as the ability of both eyes to follow the same point of focus (while reading, for example) or quickly moving the eyes (for example, from one word to the next).
• Fusion (Binocular Vision): the combining of images from the two eyes to form a single image.
• Eye Focusing: the ability to focus in, and clearly see an object at near.
• Spatial Processing: an ability to know where things are in space and where you are in space.
• Visual Motor Integration: hand-eye coordination.

Binocular vision issues are the most commonly treated type of problem in vision therapy.

Train Your Brain With Vision Therapy

Learning-Related Vision Difficulties

It’s important to note that learning-related vision difficulties are not the same as learning disabilities. The distinction is that the learning-related vision challenges are caused by issues with the visual system. The three main categories of learning-related vision issues are eye health/refractive problems, functional visual skills problems, and perceptual (visual information processing) vision problems.

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Strabismus (Turned Eye) and Amblyopia (Lazy Eye)

Strabismus and amblyopia are both issues that have to do with developmental problems of the eye. Strabismus occurs when the eyes do not align properly, whereas amblyopia is a problem with visual acuity. These issues can occur separately or together, but both may cause poor vision if left untreated. There are many types of strabismus that can occur at different ages and for different reasons and are treated in different ways.  If you have an eye turn, book a visual functional skills assessment with Dr. Polonenko to determine what approach is best for helping align your eyes.

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Concussion/Acquired Brain Injury

When an individual suffers a brain injury, sometimes their visual system is affected: this is called post-trauma (or post-concussion) vision syndrome (PTVS). Symptoms can include sensitivity to light, headaches, nausea, and double vision. Often, a few symptoms may have to  do with the health of the eyes themselves, but most are a result of the trauma the visual system of the brain has endured.

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Sports Vision Enhancement

Regardless of your sport, your vision plays a key role. Sports Vision training is a proven way to increase the speed, accuracy, and coordination of your visual system. Vision training for enhanced sports performance can improve your hand-eye coordination, speed of recognition, reaction time, and more. Book an appointment with Dr. Polonenko to determine how vision training can help your game.

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